WAPO Slanders U.S. Military in Iraq

By Alan Caruba

I rarely read The New York Times or Washington Post because the reporting is so biased it sickens me. Pick any topic, from politics to science, these and other liberal mainstream newspapers are divorced from the most basic standards of honesty and accuracy.

On Sundays, however, I visit their websites to get a sense of the latest liberal themes and, on the Washington Post site, I found “Civilian killings created insurmountable hurdle to extended U.S. troop presence in Iraq” by Liz Sly. It made me very angry and it should make anyone who lost a father, a brother, a sister or mother who served in Iraq, not just to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, but since 2003 to depose him from power and see him brought to justice in Iraq by Iraqis.

Thanks as well to those who served, but returned with grievous injuries, often from improvised explosive devises—many of which were made in Iran, along with all the others who returned home from the nightmare of fighting an enemy who looked like every other Iraqi.

The point of Ms. Sly’s article was to defame all who served in Iraq and, of course, those who died there. Quoting an Iraqi who lost family members, she encapsulated the theme of her article. “They are barbarians,” he said. He went on to say, “We wish they never had come.” One Iraqi hardly speaks for all Iraqis, of course, but in the context of Ms. Sly’s article, he did.

By the second paragraph, she was citing “a group of Marines (who) went on a shooting spree in which 24 Iraqi civilians were killed” on November 19, 2005. You had to read nine more paragraphs into the article to learn that charges were brought against seven Marines and dropped against six of them. A seventh was acquitted while an eighth will stand trial in January.

You had to read even further before Ms. Sly cites a U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan regarding the period of 2005-2007. Gen. Buchanan is not directly quoted, but Ms. Sly notes that “The vast majority of civilian deaths were the result of Iraqis killing Iraqis.” No kidding!

Iraqis killing Iraqis was endemic to the Saddam Hussein regime. The history of Iraq after he came to power in 1979 until his fall in 2003 is one of mass murder, summary and arbitrary executions, rape, and torture.

For example, in March 15-19, 1988, Saddam authorized the use of poison gas against the citizens of a Kurdish town, Halabja, killing thousands. That same year, he launched an Al-Anfal campaign of extermination against Kurds living in Northern Iraq. Their crime was siding with Iranians during the Iraq-Iran war that had lasted from September 1980 to August 1988. The attacks resulted in deaths estimated to be between 50,000 and 100,000, many of whom were women and children.

Saddam repeated this in April 1991 after having been driven out of Kuwait by allied forces led by the U.S. Uprisings in northern Iraq resulted in estimates of civilian dead ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 Kurds and between 60,000 to 130,000 for Shiites.

When U.S. troops invaded in 2003 several mass graves were found, believed to have been a response to a 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein.

None of this information was unavailable to the Washington Post reporter who quoted a lawmaker, Sami al-Askari, identified as “a close aid to Prime Minister Mouri al-Maliki.” He said, “The image of the American soldier is as a killer, not a defender. And how can you give a killer immunity?”

American troops were and are always subject to U.S. military justice, but those troops often found themselves in fire fights with an enemy that did not wear uniforms. Civilians were killed in the fog of war.

The world shall probably never know how many Iraqis died in Saddam Hussein’s prisons or as the result of campaigns carried out against Kurds and tribes in the south. He had already used weapons of mass destruction, poison gas, and it was widely believed he retained the capacity to use them if invaded. The intelligence agencies of several Western nations were convinced of this, though few were found in the wake of the invasion.

It is a wonder to me that Ms. Sly took the time to report that, according to the Department of Defense, 4,474 American service members died in Iraq, 3,518 of whom were killed in action.

Our military is withdrawing at long last from Iraq. I will not engage in an analysis of the decisions that were made to invade, but the best one was to rid Iraq of a monster called Saddam Hussein who killed far more Iraqis than the American military ever did.

It should not escape anyone’s notice that, in the wake of the Iraq war, the citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and currently in Syria, rose up to rid themselves of dictators. Were they encouraged by the U.S. military campaign and the result in Iraq? Yes.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Apparently We Have Won the Iraq War

By Alan Caruba

I had an odd thought the other day. Apparently we have won the Iraq war.

The president of Iraq thinks so and he wants us to leave. That's good enough for me, but apparently not for George W. Bush or John McCain. Neither of these gentlemen seems inclined to be leave. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is still trying to make up his mind when to leave. If elected, my bet is that he will find an excuse to stay.

There's all this talk of departure "horizons" versus "timetables." The good news is that we not engaged in shoot-outs every day and that the Iraqi army and police force now numbers over 500,000 men.

As matters stand now, Rasmussen Reports has posted notice that 63% of those surveyed as of July 22 want the troops to return home. That is a virtual mandate.

This war has been marked by endless absurdities starting with the USS Abraham Lincoln where President Bush announced that combat had ended and reconstruction would begin. That was in 2003. The war had been pursued on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Turns out he didn't by the time we invaded, but—surprise—he did have tons of "yellowcake", the stuff you need to make nuclear weapons.

Was there ever a more political round of absurd nonsense than the fuss over The New York Times opinion piece by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, followed by the revelation his wife worked for the CIA? A massive and needless investigation of White House aides ensued, led by a prosecutor who knew exactly who leaked the facts about her. Wilson had written that he had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake. He has been proclaiming his indignation ever since. Nobody likes a crybaby.

The Iraq War will likely qualify as one of the most curious in our very long history of military interventions in the Middle East. The troops, bless'm, were in Baghdad within in a week or so, but once there the Iraqis began looting everything that wasn't nailed down and burning a great deal of their own infrastructure including schools, libraries and universities.

Having gone in with too few troops, nothing could be done to secure the city and, after the looting, the nation became a killing ground as various internal and external factions made war on each other and on us. In the process we lost some 4,000 troops. Eventually, the level of Iraqis killing Iraqis reached a point where even they found it nauseating.

The result? Peace, glorious peace!

Americans tend to forget that, in the Middle East, most political disagreements are settled with assassinations such as the murder of Egypt's Anwar Sadat and, more recently, the killing of Benezir Bhutto in Pakistan. In Lebanon, the Syrians assassinated a whole raft of politicians whom they found irksome. Several efforts have been made to kill Hamid Karzi of Afghanistan. In Gaza, Fatah was forced out by Hamas at gunpoint. Having achieved zero cooperation for decades, world leaders keep insisting that the Israelis negotiate with Fatah, giving them land and lollypops.

In the midst of the speculation about a possible war with Iran, people forget that, under Saddam's leadership, Iraqis fought Iranians for eight years in the 1980s. The result was a million casualties and a total stalemate. Then Saddam invaded Kuwait, occasioning our first visit there. And people still wonder why Bush43 concluded that it was cheaper in the short run to just invade and kill Saddam.

The history of conflict in the Middle East suggests that Arabs are not very good at fighting wars. If Lebanon's Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, decides to attack Israel again, the only thing left of Beirut and the rest of the nation will be its wall-to-wall smoldering ruins. It's always a bad idea to attack Israel, particularly for a second time.

Listening to presidential candidates arguing back and forth about withdrawing from Iraq is a tad surreal. Realistically it will take at least a year or more to get out of Iraq because we have a ton of hardware there. Most of it will be warehoused in Kuwait and Qatar.

Tucked away in desert wadis, encampments of American troops will likely be pulling duty in Iraq for a very long time to come. Once we invade a nation we never really leave.

The Middle East is what it has always been; a festering cesspool of oppression, corruption, backwardness, and despair. What else is new?

In truth, the United States has been sending troops to the Middle East since Thomas Jefferson commissioned our first Marines to kill Barbary pirates. We built the first U.S. Navy precisely for that purpose.

No doubt there will be some kind of big international confab to conclude the recent unpleasantness in Iraq and everyone will toast each other with champagne and toss back some really good caviar.

Saddam Hussein is dead. We won. It's time to redeploy to some other nation foolish enough to get our attention.